Top 5 Killer Lead Generation Tips for Startups

Lead Generation is the action or process of identifying, attracting and converting ‘suspects’ and ‘prospects’ into leads. Leads are potential customers who have expressed some interest in your products or company and have provided information that you can use to follow up with. Generating a steady flow of new leads to fill your pipeline is a crucial part of developing a profitable business. Yet despite this, only 1 in 10 marketers say that their lead generation efforts are highly efficient and effective. A survey by HubSpot in 2018 showed that 61% of marketers said that generating traffic and leads was their top challenge, with 85% of B2B marketers saying that lead generation was their most important marketing goal. But what about the 10%~ of start-ups that are experiencing large success and rapid growth? What are they doing to fill their pipeline with highly qualified prospects who are ready to purchase their products?

To attract the right kinds of leads, it’s essential that you do some buyer persona research on who exactly your ideal clients are, and from there begin to develop these personas. Use the knowledge you’ve gathered from your research to align your value proposition with your ideal client’s pain points (or Business Drivers, as we like to call them). We then need to understand the impact these pains are having on the business and what the implications are, from there you can create content around those pain points and implications and distribute it in various ways that will best serve your clients at each stage of the buying process. For example, buyers who are at the top the funnel may be more interested in informational pieces, like whitepapers or eBooks. Whereas someone who’s further down the funnel might be more interested in seeing a demo of your products and services or could even want to trial them for themselves. It doesn’t matter where in the funnel your prospects are, the key is to make your offerings so attractive that your potential clients can’t help but get in touch. Whether this is directly from your website, through social media, adverts, email-based campaigns or through direct contact via a team of ISRs. Always make yourself stand out.

An effective lead generation strategy will turn every piece of content into an opt-in offer. You don’t need to rely on the  Contact Us section of your website and sign-up forms at the end of all of your blog posts (although these are always very useful to have). The best thing to do is to have a multitude of these offers across your entire site. The more that your potential clients can relate to your offerings, the more sign-ups you are going to receive, and the more contacts you’ll have to fill your pipeline.  You may think that you’re over doing it when it comes to opt-in offers, but this simply isn’t true. Readers are known to have very short attentions spans, so if you’ve only got a few offers dotted around your page, they’ll be forgotten about once they’ve been scrolled past. The important thing to remember is that your opt-in forms are hassle free, the last thing anyone wants (including yourselves) are large sign-up forms getting in their way.   In our opinion the best practice is to minimise the number of required fields for your potential clients (or prospects) to fill out. Only ask for information that your sales team really needs, because if your form is too demanding, people won’t take the time to fill it out. In a survey carried out in 2018, 72% of marketers said that having a good content strategy was a major key to their success.   Providing  content  such as whitepapers and  eBooks  in return for a potential clients contact information ensures compliance with GDPR (which you really need to be in compliance with). Couple this with the fact that on average,  inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound leads, and you’re getting some real benefits.   With the right  content  strategy in place  with the correct use of content syndication you will be able to quickly grow your contact database and give yourself a running start when it comes to your lead generation process.

A CTA (or Call To Action) is meant to send potential clients to a dedicated landing page where they will receive a specific offer for a specific product or service. Even though strategic landing pages are used by 68% of B2B businesses to acquire leads, there are still many who simply don’t use them. This can make quite a big impact on their conversion rates when you take into account that when businesses follow-up with an online lead within 5 minutes, that leads is nine times more likely to convert into a customer. Be sure not to use a CTA to drive people towards your homepage, because most of the time the offer you are talking about in your CTA, won’t be at the very top of your homepage where people are going to end up. If you have the option, trying using videos on your landing pages, as research has shown that this will increase your conversions by an average of 86%. The more landing pages you have, the more leads you will generate, according to this HubSpot survey, companies with more than 30 strategic landing pages on their website, generated seven times more leads than companies with between one and five. Remember, if you have the opportunity to use a CTA, make sure to send prospects to a page that will convert them into a lead.

Now we arrive at the wonders of social media. Whilst many marketers think of social media as a tool to fill the top of your sales funnel, it can still be a helpful and low-cost method of lead generation, as we mentioned in a previous article. You’ll want to start off by sharing links on various social media channels to your high performing landing pages. Make sure you make it clear that these links will be sending people to a landing page though, that way people will end up where they expect to be.   Social media channels like Facebook and LinkedIn have loads of great features that can help you with  social selling. The key here is learning how to utilise  the concept of social selling, it’s more than just sharing content on websites like  Facebook,  LinkedIn and Twitter and hoping the leads just pour in, it’s about building a relationship with your potential clients and engaging with them on a more personal level.

Now this article wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention outbound telemarketing, which, in my opinion is the most effective and important method of generating high-qualify, qualified leads. As I mentioned earlier, 85% of B2B marketers said that lead generation is their most important marketing goal, true lead generation cannot be achieved without a team of top quality ISR/SDR/BDMs to contact your prospects and qualify them for your sales teams.    Now I’m not talking about Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), these will be generated (hopefully) by the various inbound methods that I talked about earlier, no, I’m talking about Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and Sales Ready Leads (SRLs), 46% of marketers with well-planned lead generation strategies have teams of dedicated ISR/SDR/BDMs that will follow up on more than 75% of their Marketing Qualified Leads and convert these into Sales Qualified and Sales Ready Leads to hand over to their sales team.  69% of marketers say that converting their MQLs into SQLs and SRLs is their top priority. This process is more commonly called “nurturing” and I cannot stress the importance of it enough, but maybe this will help, businesses who nurture their leads make (on average) 50% more sales at a cost 33% less, than non-nurture prospects.

In the modern lead generation world, there is no place for simply “winging it”. If you want to stand out amongst the competition you must keep tabs on vital metrics that are relevant to your goals. For virtually every business, the most important key performance indicators (KPIs), are lead generation metrics, as these provide you with an insight into the customer journey. There are many lead generation KPIs that you need to be aware of, including; Click-Through Rates, Conversion Rates, Time to Conversion, Return on Investment and many more. We will be covering these in our next article, be sure to request a copy once it goes live. In conclusion, whether your lead generation strategies use all of these methods, or a specific mixture, one thing is key. Everything that you do needs to be targeted, a ‘multitouch’ approach, if you will, all of the touchpoints that your prospect has with your company need to be consistent and relevant to them. The more you revisit and test your inbound and outbound lead generation process, the more you’ll improve the quality of your leads and as we all know, the higher the quality of your leads, the higher the chance is of turning that prospect, into a client.